“We got blamed”: Why did Siouxsie Sioux hate goth rock?
How do you spot a goth band? Well, just look for anyone telling you that they’re not a goth band. The same goes for most subcultures, to be honest. The label ‘goth’ does have something of a complicated history, though, and I’m not just talking about the historical tribe. The birth of goth goes hand in hand with the prime of punk in its 1970s heyday, and many artists and tastemakers who defined what we know today as goth would far sooner call themselves punk than anything else. Nowhere is this more apparent than with The Banshees’ head honcho, Siouxsie Sioux.
The woman-born Susan Ballion has more punk credentials than the vast majority of bands we’d credit with the genre’s initial storm of controversy and popularity. A suburban kid from Chislehurst in Kent, two things completely changed her life. Firstly, she discovered the gay disco scene that her older siblings frequented, and secondly, she heard that an unsigned band called Sex Pistols performed at her local art college. Hilariously, it was being told that Johnny Rotten had threatened the audience, which sold her on seeing the band.
In February 1976, she and her friend Steven Severin made the trip to London to watch the Pistols for the first time. After chatting with the band after the show, Sioux and Severin decided to follow the band. Their ever-present presence at what were becoming the most notorious gigs in British music, combined with the striking image Sioux was cribbing from the club scene, eventually led to her group of Pistols fans developing fame of their own, being tagged with the loathed nickname of ‘The Bromley Contingent’.
That infamous TV appearance with Bill Grundy? That’s the Bromley Contingent in the back. The 19-year-old that Grundy grotesquely cracks on to, leading Steve Jones to make TV history by labelling him a “dirty rotter”? Yup, that’s Siouxsie Sioux. By that time, Sioux had started to think about putting a band together of her own. So, she began to distance herself from the Sex Pistols in favour of the group she and Severin were conceptualising, The Banshees.
Realistically, very little separated the Banshees from the rest of the punk scene. The drummer for their first gig was Sid Vicious after all They were a bunch of snotty teenagers, inspired by their peers, who couldn’t play their instruments but were making a statement anyway. The only thing particularly different was the scope of the music. Rather than focusing on four to the flour, rock ‘n’ roll ramalama, the band developed it further, taking influence from krautrock, Bowie and The Velvet Underground.
Thus, the band being lumped in with the early goth movement of the early 1980s did not sit well with Sioux. In 1998, she told Mojo their music “got hijacked by a movement… I’ve never liked any music that followed. The music that followed us, I found a lot of it pantomime.” Which is unfair to a lot of the brilliant goth music that sprouted from the scene. Not that any of the bands who made it would cop to the label though.
Joking aside, though, put yourself in Siouxsie Sioux’s shoes for a moment. It must be galling to get involved with the punk scene, be inspired by punk music and put together a punk band to then be called something else entirely and be treated as a bit of a joke because of it. However, more likely, her real problem was not with what label she was being slapped with but that she was being labelled at all. Sioux’s refusal to conform wasn’t a notion she held entirely for the establishment; she would rally against the music industry, too. Punk, goth, new wave or otherwise, Siouxsie Sioux was one of a kind and calling her anything but her name was a daft decision to make.
